Earlier this month, I spent a full weekend with my three-year-old goddaughter Hettie, culminating on Sunday morning with ‘Messy Church’: a two-hour arts, crafts and puppet show extravaganza. filled with little children, based on Bible Stories.
When he was due to leave for London, he was frankly devastated.
However, as I said goodbye, looking forward to the peaceful train ride that awaited me, Hettie squealed, “Hug!” and climbed into my arms. As her small body snuggled warm and soft against my hip, I forgot my tiredness and felt like I was melting. I gave it a squeeze and a kiss and the thought invaded my mind: what if I had one of these?
I am 36 years old, single and I assume the probability of not having my own children.
Although I have these melancholy pangs (when I hold Hettie, I see my nephew’s face light up with a flash of teeth or my niece moves her arms with excitement), I have pretty much accepted that, unless there is a startling change in circumstances, I won’t I’m going to go. be a mother
I am far from alone in this.
Isolde Walters writes that many of her peers who didn’t want to have children graduated with student debt when the 2008 financial crisis hit and are now struggling with a cost-of-living crisis.
Yesterday we learned that the birth rate in England and Wales has fallen to the lowest level since records began almost 90 years ago. The total fertility rate fell last year to 1.44 children per woman, well below the rate of 2.1 believed necessary to maintain a stable population without internal migration.
This is not just a UK problem. Around the world, birth rates are plummeting. Italy, known for its family-oriented culture, currently has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Rates in the United States and Asia have also fallen to record lows.
And these declining birth rates spell trouble for society for decades to come. Fewer babies mean a shrinking workforce, fewer workers to support a growing elderly population, and untold pressure on public finances and economic growth.
As Jonathan Portes, professor of economics and public policy at King’s College London, said yesterday, the trend should certainly “worry anyone thinking about what Britain will look like in 2050.”
Billionaire Elon Musk has even argued – more than once – that collapsing birth rates pose a greater risk to civilization than global warming.
So why don’t millennial women like me have children?
In my case, I had always assumed that one day I would have children, in the same thoughtless way that I assumed I would make the same money as my parents.
I didn’t seriously think about the question of whether I should have children until a couple of years ago.
Why so late? I can only claim distraction. I’ve been mostly single my entire life and certainly haven’t been in a relationship where kids were on the agenda.
I moved to New York when I was 30, where the focus was firmly on work and play.
The babies just didn’t factor into it. I flew home when my nephew was born, marveled at his little toes and then quickly forgot about the bundle of joy other than the WhatsApp updates I was receiving across the Atlantic. I was too busy, too absorbed in the life I was building for myself.
It was when I returned to the UK aged 33 and watched my friends become mothers that I realized I was now at the stage where ‘family life’ was beginning. Somehow I still had the mindset that someone telling you they were pregnant didn’t automatically mean congratulations were in order.
Billionaire Elon Musk has said that collapsing birth rates pose a greater risk to civilization than global warming.
There is no doubt that it takes my generation much longer to reach the milestones of adulthood than previous generations.
Many of us graduated, saddled with student debt, when the 2008 financial crisis hit (or suffered its consequences). We are now experiencing a cost of living crisis in which once-strong industries are laying off much of their workforce. Crippling rents have made home ownership a distant dream. In expensive cities, many of us still live in shared houses into our 30s.
Is it so surprising that a significant proportion of us are putting off babies and, perhaps, giving them up altogether?
Then there are the warnings from the harassed mothers among us. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who have complained to me that the staggering cost of childcare eats up most of their monthly salary.
We childless Millennials stare in bewilderment at childcare fees that cost thousands of pounds a month. How could we afford it? Would that mean, therefore, having to leave work?
A related topic: ‘mom guilt’. Stressed, exhausted friends who have babies tell me they feel like they’re failing on every front, neither as a perfect mother nor as a perfect employee. “Work as if you were not a mother, mother as if you did not work,” they are told, but how can they do it?
There are other reasons to explain why my generation is not having babies, including concerns about climate change and bringing children into an already overloaded world (this is not one of my fears, but a friend has mentioned it as the main reason for his indecision about having a baby); lack of optimism in the future; and increasing levels of education and employment among women, which historically leads to fewer babies. But one thing is missing from the debate. It is not just women who are responsible for falling birth rates. Men also play a role.
And believe me, it’s not like there are hordes of men desperate to be fathers but unable to find a woman willing to make it happen.
Just as women are choosing not to be mothers, men are choosing not to be fathers. And it is undeniable that modern dating has contributed to the collapse of the birth rate.
Dating apps have encouraged us to become increasingly casual in our search for love, to replace it with a much less binding lust. Serious relationships seem harder than ever to achieve.
I find appointments so full of disappointments and time-consuming administrative tasks that I rarely do them. This approach is unlikely to lead to a couple and, later, a baby.
Many women I know would be open to motherhood but, now in their 30s, have not found a suitable partner. Many are weighing their options in this regard. Five friends have frozen their eggs and an acquaintance has had a baby with the help of Viking sperm, courtesy of a clinic in Denmark.
I’ve never seriously considered going through any of that.
While I’m relieved that there are options for women who feel called to be mothers but don’t have a man in the picture, the prospect of raising a child alone makes me want to lock myself in a bathroom and curl up in the fetal position.
I can’t imagine the organization, strength, support and superhuman funds required to be a single mother, but I’m pretty sure I don’t have it.
Five of Isolde Walter’s friends had their eggs frozen and a woman she knows had a baby with sperm in a clinic in Denmark.
I’d rather leave it to fate, chance, a higher power, whatever you want to call it.
Because I hope to fall in love and have a baby. But if that person doesn’t show up or doesn’t arrive on time or the stars don’t quite align, I can accept life without a child.
That acceptance is not without sadness. I’ve heard women talk about the joy of motherhood, that it’s the best thing they’ve ever done, that any work accomplishment or travel adventure pales in comparison to raising a child.
It saddens me to think that I may never look at my own child and feel an all-encompassing surge of love.
But I tell myself there are many trade-offs: more money, more freedom, less worry, the opportunity to travel, focus on work and hobbies, invest in friendships and relationships.
It seems that more and more Millennials are saying the same thing.